virtualenv VS fish-shell

For more information visit: virtualenv documentation.

Python's venv module is officially recommended for creating virtual environments since Python 3.5 comes packaged with your Python installation. While there still are additional older tools available, such as conda and virtualenv, if you are new to virtual environments, it is best to use venv now.

Despite these attractive attributes, many developers I've come across don't prefer Fish shell, primarily due to integration gaps with tools like Python's virtualenv. So, in this article, I'm offering a simple solution for automatic virtualenv activation for Fish shell, steering clear of resource-intensive frameworks like oh-my-fish that often slow down the shell.

`virtualenv` still exists and is still actively developed. It's true that Python 3 ships with `venv` but I think `virtualenv` offers some additional features.

https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv

virtualenv is a tool that creates an isolated Python environment for each of your projects.

Python is the chosen language for this tutorial and as you can guess some precautions should be done to make sure that the environment is setup correctly and the main OS I'll use is Ubuntu(a Linux distro) virtual environment is a tool that helps you to isolate your code from the rest of the system. It is a good idea to create a virtual environment for your project.

$ curl -O https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/raw/master/virtualenv.py$ python virtualenv.py my_new_env$ . my_new_env/bin/activate(my_new_env)$ pip install ... Or something entirely different?

I've been using Fish for years and spend my entire day working with Python. Python's virtualenv has an `activate.fish` command, I've never had any problems with it. Additionally, we have a ton of internal tooling built in a fabfile, so I've written a couple of snippets of fish that automatically activate that .venv (Poetry managed) whenever I cd into a directory that has one, and also expands a bunch of env vars into the shell session. I've also got this feature request in on the virtualenv repo in the hope that one day we can have activate.fish emit an event - https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/1456

We of cause, like all good developers do, put the error message online and look for clues, we quickly found a GitHub issue and boi, we are not the only souls that got crushed by a "timely" release of virtualenv just a few hours before us. Since the lastest version of virtualenv got installed every time we create the CI build job on Travis, it fails even we have done nothing. Of cause we didn't point fingers at other maintainers, they are just as hardworking as us and it's human to make mistakes. We are faced with 2 options, roll back to the previous release or wait for the patch of virtualenv to get released. As the devs of virtualenv did a lighting fast patch, we have chosen option 2.

Reminds of the note at the bottom of Fish's releases. It's there because the build system cannot determine the current version for some reason. Hopefully that will go away now that they have switched to a different language / build system. The custom tarball is used by Arch Linux at the very least.

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/releases/tag/3.7.1

https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/7772#issueco...

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/fi...

A recent practical example of the former: the fish shell re-wrote incrementally from C++ to Rust, and is almost finished https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

An example of the latter: c2rust, which is a work in progress but is very impressive https://github.com/immunant/c2rust

It currently translates into unsafe Rust, but the strategy is to separate the "compile C to unsafe Rust" steps and the "compile unsafe Rust to safe Rust" steps. As I see it, as it makes the overall task simpler, allows for more user freedom, and makes the latter potentially useful even for non-transpiled code. https://immunant.com/blog/2023/03/lifting/

And this discussion from November has an update on the progress: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/discussions/10123

We're using bash as our terminal shell for now (it is standard in many distros) but it is not the only one out there. If you want to test out zsh, fish or oh-my-zsh, you will see that there are a few differences and the features are usually the main differentiator. Try that, poke around.

They have a variety of reasons to move to rust, as outlined in their original rust discussion[1]. Mostly around finding other contributors, and adding an async/parallel mode they're comfortable with.

[1] https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/9512